


Play Pretend

by butforthegrace



Category: Cinderella - All Media Types, Fairy Tales and Related Fandoms
Genre: F/M, Fairy Tales, Halloween, Masked ball, Revisionist Fairy Tale
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-09-04
Updated: 2011-09-04
Packaged: 2017-10-23 10:30:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,600
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/249304
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/butforthegrace/pseuds/butforthegrace
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She's Cinderella, and Prince Charming is the devil.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Play Pretend

Her name is Cindy.  It’s old-fashioned and she hates it, but she’d never think of changing it, or going by something else; it’s the most immortal thing her mother left to her, and she holds to it as tightly as she does to her father’s books, imagines that if she changes her name, her mother will die for good.  (She still dreams, some nights, of her mother alive again, sitting in the living room and smiling at Cindy over a mug of tea.)

His name is Julian.  He’s popular and carefree, especially with women.  His girlfriend calls him Prince Charming, looks up at him adoringly as she says it; there’s no hint of irony there.  It disgusts Cindy.  How can that girl be so blind to his faults? Whenever they’re at parties together, he leaves her and spends hours flirting with someone else while she tells whoever she’s with that he’ll be back soon, just a few more minutes, he’s probably getting them all drinks.

Eventually Cindy is that girl at the party.  They’re at a masked ball on Halloween night; her sorority threw the party, and though the official claim is that everyone who’s anyone is there, it’s more like everyone who wants to get laid is there.  Something about the masks removes everyone’s inhibitions; even Cindy, who sticks by her friends at most parties, is flirting and dancing with people she doesn’t know, boys, girls, all for fun and laughs and the vodka on the rocks is going to her head and everything is fine until—

Until Julian comes up to her, his mask transparent red, devil’s horns on his head, and he smiles at her.  He’s as charming as his costume, and the white teeth between the red lips are so enticing, but it clears Cindy’s head.  She knows he is danger.  She’s seen him with other girls enough times to be aware.

She doesn’t smile back.

He’s holding a shot of tequila and another drink she doesn’t recognize, and he asks if she wants a drink.  No.  “What’s your name, princess?” he asks, and she remembers suddenly the plastic tiara perched on her head, swiped out of her stepsister’s closet—

“She’s Cinderella,” her friend declares—Lucy, clearly, does not have the same sense of caution that Cindy does—and Julian smiles.

“And I’m Prince Charming.  Fancy that.”

“You’re a devil,” says Cindy, and it’s not in the same tone of good humor that everyone else is speaking in.  Julian’s smile fades for just a moment.  She has seen through him and he knows it, they both do, and she wonders if he’s more dangerous to her now than he was when he thought she had no idea who the devil was.

He looks at her then, at the plastic tiara stolen from her stepsister and the sparkly blue minidress and the glass heels (four inches, she can barely walk in them), and then into her eyes.  She looks away before she can be drawn under any sort of spell.

“Come talk with me, Cinderella,” he says, and for some reason she’s following him out to the back, where the porch is empty.  Everyone else is inside; even in October, it’s disgustingly humid, and the house is air-conditioned.  But there’s a breeze out here, and she focuses on the huge moon overhead, and not at the dangerous young man standing beside her.

“Don’t you have a girlfriend?” she asks him as he puts his hand low on her hip.  She doesn’t push it away.  Not yet.

“We’re all supposed to be anonymous tonight,” he reminds her.  “It’s not as fun if you know who I am.”

“What’s not as fun?” She is suspicious, and now she removes his hand, batting it away from her skin like she would a mosquito.

He laughs.  She wishes she knew what at.  “Let’s not play games, princess.  Boy meets girl at a ball.  It’s a classic tale.”

She shakes her head.  “Not for this girl.”

“Come now, Cinderella,” he says, “don’t you want to have a little fun tonight?” His hand grazes her hip again, and this time moves lower, cupping her ass.  She glares at him and very pointedly removes his hand, and steps away.

“I thought you were supposed to be charming.”

He smiles like a wolf.  “That, and wily too.  Call me a coyote.”

She doesn’t smile.

But she doesn’t move, either, when he puts his hands on her again, until he goes in for a kiss and she jerks away, startled out of some spell.  Before he can speak, she’s running back inside, struggling to move fast in her glass heels.  One falls off as she crosses the doorway back into the house, but she doesn’t turn back for it.

 

 

 

Cindy doesn’t see him for a week.

She’d spent the rest of the party avoiding the boy wearing devil’s horns as best she could; she saw him sticking his tongue down Lucy’s throat at one point and took that as her cue to go upstairs to bed.  Thankfully no one was in her room; she locked her door and went to sleep without taking off her costume.  One glass heel stayed on her foot as she slept, until she woke up, took it off, and smashed it on the floor.

She goes through the motions as she normally does, listens to Lucy talk about the cute devil she hooked up with at the ball (thank god, she thinks not for the first time, that she and Lucy do not share a room), does her schoolwork, swims laps.

It’s at the pool where he finds her.

Cindy is always the last one there, slicing through the glowing water.  It clears her head.  Water does that; she’s always loved its bodies: lakes, the ocean, swimming pools.  Lucy complains about the stink of chlorine, but Cindy revels in it.

She’s not quite doing that now; she’s not _thinking_ , her mind is white noise.  All she knows is the sound of the water lapping against her ears, and the bright lights underneath her.  It’s completely peaceful.

Until someone breaks the silence: “Cinderella.”

She stops at the wall, looks up to where the devil stands at the side of the pool, across it from her.  She shoves up her goggles and squints at him through hair plastered to her face.

Julian.  Holding a heel made of glass.

She makes a small hissing sound of frustration and pulls herself out of the water.  “What do you want?” she calls to him.

“Come over here.”

Against her instincts, she does as he asks; she dives back into the pool and parts the waters with strong strokes, ends up at the other end of the pool as quickly as she’s ever swum.  He looks down at her with the devil’s smile; aware that he can see down her suit, she quickly gets out of the pool, and stands facing him.

“What do you want?” she asks again.

“I just came to give this back to you.”  He holds up the glass heel.

“It’s not mine,” she says, and it’s true; it’s not hers anymore, not since she smashed its twin to pieces and threw out the shards.  She’d almost forgotten there were two.

“Are you sure, Cinderella? I’ve already asked the ugly sorority sisters—“ she stiffens at how casually the insult leaves his mouth, as if he’s not trying to be insulting but just speaking his own truth—“and it didn’t fit a one.  Might fit you.  Try it on.”

She takes the shoe from him.  It’s light in her hand, like a bird; it shows her skin and the pool distorted.  But she doesn’t put it on.  Instead she walks over to where she left her flip-flops, and says to him, “Meet me outside.  I’ll try it on the steps.”  He doesn’t look pleased, but watches her walk into the locker room.

She puts the glass heel down on one of the benches and gets her clothes out of a locker, changes in the dark room, surrounded by metal.  She takes her time: squeezes the water out of her hair and brushes it, reapplies her makeup.  And then she puts the sandals back on and goes out, and leaves the building, where he is waiting on the steps, watching a car drift by on the road.

“Here I am,” she says, and he turns around.  It’s not appreciation written on his face so much as naked lust; no pure kind of wanting but something more sinister, like he’ll swallow her whole if she’ll let him.

“Try on the shoe.”

Cindy kneels down and takes the glass heel out of her backpack; looks at it again, at its thin four-inch heel and the weird distortions.  She takes off her left sandal; she thinks this shoe is for her left foot.

And then she throws the glass shoe down as hard as she can, smashing it on the cement.

She does it looking at Julian, whose smug lust turns into despairing shock.  She wonders if she is the first girl to not do what he wanted, to smash the shoe instead of putting it on.  She delights in the fury she sees, in the way the power has so suddenly switched.

She slips her sandal back on, smiles sweetly at Julian as she stands up.  “It doesn’t fit,” she tells him, and walks past him, leaving him on the steps of the athletic center as she heads home to the sorority house.  For all she knows, he stands there all night.

She doesn’t see him again.


End file.
